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She leaned in, whispered, “You’ve paid no dues. But you will.” She smiled, and abruptly moved to a large case at the other end of the room.
“Why are you doing this?” he called out after her, and it echoed off the dirty concrete walls. “Why?!”
She pulled a handful of portable immersion heaters from the case and walked back toward the tank, setting them on the floor. “I’m doing this for the children you abused, the lives you’ve ruined, the innocence you’ve stolen. For every child who trusted a dirty prick like you.”
She grabbed one of the immersion heaters and walked to one of the extension cords, plugging it in. She then turned on the heater and dumped it into the tank, the coils dipping into the water with the monster.
He started to thrash as soon as she put it in and moved on to the next one. Or he tried to. She’d made sure to inject him with a healthy dose of muscle relaxants, and to bind him as tight as she possibly could. Not very sporting, really, but it wasn’t very sporting to prey on children either.
Turnabout was fair play.
She continued the routine with the immersion heaters and the extension cords as she spoke, ten in total. He wiggled and writhed, and then yelped as the hot coils brushed against his skin.
“Me, personally, my monsters had an affinity for medieval torture. They used it to control us. To tear us down. To break us.” He really thrashed then, spilling water over the edges, but not the heaters. They remained where they were, floating in the water around him, searing his skin. She spotted some water hitting the extension cord connections, sparks too, so she grabbed some tarps from the front room and covered the cords as best she could.
She then stood before the tank with her hands on her hips, watching him squirm like a salted slug. “I researched a lot about medieval torture after we escaped. Fascinating stuff, really.”
“Please . . .” He wept loudly. “Please let me go!”
She put a hand up. Scowled at him. “Mr. Anderson, please. I’m trying to teach you something here. Don’t be rude.” She shot him a saccharine smile. “Now, this particular form of medieval torture, they didn’t give it some fancy name. They just called it boiling. Creative, huh?”
He started to tremble, frantically looking around, as if he wanted out of his own skin.
“Back in the sixteenth century, good old Henry VIII made it a legal form of capital punishment. But they used oil. Can you believe that?” she asked rhetorically with a playful tone. “Back then, they had these special iron cauldrons. Those fuckers were massive. And they’d build fires underneath them to heat it. To cook the condemned.” She eyed the immersion heaters, at full glow now, the numerous extension cords, and she shrugged. “Sorry, this was the best I could do. And I’m not sure how long these heaters will take, they’re kind of small. This could be a long—”
“Arghhh.” The sound he made was guttural and inhuman. He thrashed more, searched desperately for help.
Orion smiled wider then. “Well, well . . . it seems I may have spoken too soon, huh, Mr. Anderson?” She hesitated a moment as the man screamed and thrashed and cried out. “Can I call you, Brecken, by the way?” she asked slyly. “I feel like we’re on that level now. Friends, even.”
Brecken Anderson responded with another wretched scream, the water around him starting to bubble.
Orion clapped her hands together. “Great! I really appreciate you being so easy to work with, Brecken.” She took a few steps closer, watching as his skin peeled and blistered and bled, and hissed, “Now, die for me, motherfucker.”
Nineteen
One Month Later
Orion had taken to killing rather well. She had managed to pick up three more men, all of them bagged as easily as Brecken had been. She chose them wisely. One a week, each of them from different parts of Missouri so as not to indicate a pattern.
She made it a little easier on herself those times—not so many extension cords, and water, less chance of electrocution.
She wasn’t even sure Brecken was dead yet when the water was cool enough to remove his body, to bury him in the grave she had already prepared. She thought she saw him twitch when the dirt poured over his blister-ridden body from the backhoe’s bucket, but she wasn’t sure. It didn’t bother her that she potentially buried him alive after boiling him, though it probably should have. It was the mess left behind that really made her change things up. The way his skin slid from his muscles like sludge onto her jacket, and the floor, and her boots. No, she decided to make her job easier, the torture less . . . messy. And she burned those boots and that jacket. A shame too, since they had been her second favorite pair. Good thing she had enough money to replace the jacket and the boots with a couple of clicks. A shame it wasn’t easy to replace her soul though.
